Tuesday, November 15, 2016

Call-out culture and the new elect

It is surpassingly odd that so many of us will reprehend a
man or woman who exhibits racial animus or a man who makes misogynistic,
homophobic, or xenophobic remarks yet remain silent about soldiers who fly
across oceans to invade the lands of other peoples to abuse and kill them. Even
if we are willing to damn the invasions, the soldiers who do the wet work get a
pass. I say this because I was one of those soldiers, and even if I explicitly
tell people that I did this or that reprehensible thing, my contrition about it
stands me up as some kind of especially virtuous person – part of a ‘progressive’
redemption narrative.

In fact, this very form of witness is highly prized by
left-liberals or progressives or whatever they are calling themselves these
days, even if they tend to convert that witness back into a narrative of sacrificial
service for the apotheosis of The Nation. War veterans who come to oppose war,
in my opinion, are doing exactly the right thing, but the practices of
contrition, atonement, and witness are transformed by others into a kind of
truer-patriotism and employed as an inoculant against accusations directed at
left-liberal/progressives/et al that they are not sufficiently patriotic, when –
oh the irony – we are actually speaking out against
patriotism.

Semioticians who lay out the dyadic Sign-Signified schema or
the more triadic and intersubjective Sign-Referent-Interpretant model seem not
to note how frequently the interpreter misconstrues the intent of the signifier,
substituting his or her own preconceptions however ill-formed.

Don’t get me wrong (get it?). I do not support racist, (hetero)sexist,
xenophobic language or actions; and I am glad that so many of us recognize how
hurtful and dangerous it is. I do not tolerate it, and neither should anyone
else.

On the other hand, I am a Christian. And we have this
troublesome notion that we are to ‘love our enemies,’ that when someone has
done something wrong and comes back with hat in hand and says “I am sorry,” we forgive. At the very least, this means
we forego any revenge, but Jesus wasn’t an ‘at-the-very-least’ kind of teacher.
In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, he leads us to believe that it is precisely
the contrite sinner who we celebrate. They have been rescued from evil. No
matter how bad someone’s crimes, genuine repentance holds the key to a kind of redemption.

In my book, Borderline,
which was about the relation between male social power, war, and constructions
of masculinity, I said that an attitude of contrition is necessary to prolong
the Incarnation for those who repent.

I fail to see how, as Christians called to compassion, we
can escape an attitude of constant contrition in sexual matters. Not contrition
as a hair shirt, but as sorrow at the brokenness of the world of which we are a
part, as repentance (turning around), and as vigilance (stay awake!). Without
contrition – accepted as a gift – and
without vigilance, we cannot fully acknowledge the hurt, take the hurt
seriously, and demonstrate that the hurt can no longer be accepted as the norm.
We – men – must stay awake and not fall prey to somnambulance, to the
anesthesia of power. (p. 399)

These things occur to me in the flurry of reaction, readjustment,
and trepidation many people are experiencing in the wake of the election of
Donald Trump to the Presidency of the United States and the corresponding election
of Republican majorities in the US House of Representatives and US Senate. Many
people are aware to varying degrees that this party, at least since the Nixon
era, has become the party of white male supremacy. White male supremacy has
been its cultural organizing
principle, even though the Republican Party as institution, like its
counterpart the Democratic Party as an institution, serve at the pleasure of a
ruling economic class.

The panic about Trump set in days before the election when
polls indicated Clinton’s conjectural lead in the race was diminishing. But
when the grim reality began to set in along about eleven at night on November 8th,
cyberspace lit up with grief, terror, and recrimination. As the days pass now,
and denial gives way to acceptance (of the fact, not the presumed outcomes),
there is a struggle to figure out what to do to resist these outcomes and the
recriminations and post-mortems continue. I wrote one myself, cleverly entitled ‘Post-mortem,’
and another slightly pithier one entitled ‘Busted clocks, trade deals, and the Republican rope-dope.’ Dozens of analyses were tendered as to what went wrong,
varying of course based on what exactly ‘wrong’ was, and – as seems to be the
case on the internet at least – many analysts were so captivated by their own
denouements that they felt compelled to attack the conclusions of other post-game
commentators, few willing to grant that more than one phenomenon might have
contributed to the debacle. Likewise, the what-to-do question has created
several internecine battles.

I am reminded and cautioned that Jacques Maritain once
remarked, “It is as easy to disentangle these remote causations as to tell at a
river’s mouth which waters come from which glaciers and from which tributaries.”
I just said that Trump can be traced to Nixon, but he can also be traced to
slavery, Christendom, even Babylon.

One
article by Fordham University Professor Charles Camosy, entitled ‘Trump won because college-educated Americans are out of touch,’ noted that racism could
not be a totalizing explanation for Trump’s victory, given that twenty-nine
percent of Latin@s voted Trump, and nor could lack of formal education explain
it, because many racial minorities with no college education voted against
Trump, while many college-educated whites voted for him. I’ll take issue with
Dr. Camosy that (1) Latin@s are homogeneous and that (2) an oppressed minority
voting for a racist candidate does not rule out racism. But that is not what I
want to emphasize about Dr. Camosy’s article. He made a remark that stands
apart from the post-election analysis that has some bearing here. He said:

As
a college professor, I know that there are many ways in which college graduates
simply know more about the world than those who do not have such degrees. This
is especially true – with some exceptions, of course – when it comes to “hard
facts” learned in science, history and sociology courses.

But
I also know that that those with college degrees – again, with some significant
exceptions – don’t necessarily know philosophy or theology. And they have
especially paltry knowledge about the foundational role that different
philosophical or theological claims play in public thought compared with
what is common to college campuses. In my experience, many professors and
college students don’t even realize that their views on political issues rely
on a particular philosophical or theological stance.

So now I come to the crux of this post, because this doesn’t just
apply to academics, it applies to most of us, including political activists. This
is why we so often say perfectly contradictory things without realizing it.

One of those contradictions that is circulating through the swarming
post-election buzz is a kind of post-Puritan perversion of the notion of ‘the
elect.’ It was Weber in his theses on
the correspondence between Protestantism and capitalism who showed how the
notion of predestination paradoxically translated into a kind of Pelagian, pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps
heresy. If people believed every human being was predestined to be one of God’s
elect at birth, then success (counted as a virtue) was sought after as evidence
to oneself and others that you were numbered among those most fortunate.

I refer readers now to another article by Liel Leibovitz, entitled
‘What to Do About Trump: The Same Thing My Grandfather Did in 1930s Vienna.’
Long story short, he outlined three principles:

(1) “Treat every poisoned word as a promise. When a bigoted blusterer
tells you he intends to force members of a religious minority to register with
the authorities—much like those friends and family of Siegfried’s who stayed
behind were forced to do before their horizon grew darker—believe him.”

(2) “You should treat people like adults, which means
respecting them enough to demand that they understand the consequences of their
actions. Explaining away or excusing the actions of others isn’t your job.”

(3) “Refuse to accept what’s going on as the new normal. Not
now, not ever.”

I am sympathetic with (1) and (3). Point (2) about holding folks responsible to “understand”
- sounds good on paper, but the assumption that some or even most people have
been formed with that capacity is simply wrong. This is just another version of
the “personal responsibility” fallacy.

Think for a moment about the people
you meet or observe every day, apart from close acquaintances but including all
the characters in your family, and you cannot seriously tell me that they “understand
the consequences of their actions,” especially political actions, because
across the political spectrum, not only do most of us lack the interpretive
frameworks to understand the consequences of politics, and not only do most of
us engage in completely magical thinking about socio-political economy,
culture, and guiding philosophies, none of us has the capacity, including the
purported leaders of the world, to grasp the shifting complexities of the
recursive dynamics between ecology, personhood, and culture. You don’t even know
what your neighbors are doing a quarter mile up the street.

That "personal responsibility fallacy" is a kind
of modern Weberian paradox. Philosophically, it is grounded in the liberal
abstract individual (someone who is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere), the
one who carries ‘choice’ and ‘responsibility’ around absent any culture that
forms them; the either-or of 'free will' versus determinism, alongside the
mistaken belief that everyone shares a conceptual framework for these so-called
choices (Republican-Democrat, Coke-Pepsi) and has the capacity to work things
out the way we think they ought to. In the face of the obvious reality that we
don't.

This personal-responsibility perspective leaves no space
beyond our self-congratulatory condemnations of the bad racists, xenophobes,
etc., for redemptions, no space for confession, atonement, or forgiveness. We
cannot love our enemies, love the Hell out of them. The bigot, the mean man,
the prodigal son, the soldier... We no longer have the gift of grace. This is
what is poisonous in a culture of calling-out that tries to make you complicit
when you point out that the hatred was learned (and can be unlearned). It is a lefty
version of the righty appeal to 'personal responsibility' for single mothers
and so forth.

We don’t understand the philosophical and-or theological
antecedents of our own thought, and so we amalgamate all kinds of contradictory
views. The same person who refuses to acknowledge that racism, for example, is
learned in a process of lifelong formation and consolidated in the person by
the social forces that construct that person, will demand that we take cultural
formation into account for the victims of racism. We know damn well that
Clarence Thomas is suffering from internalized racism, that crime among
oppressed nationalities is an outcome of being forced into underground economies,
that Hillary Clinton ‘feminism’ is the product of our naturalization of
American exceptionalism, but we refuse to accept that our “enemies” are also
products of cultural formation that were and are only partially under the
individual’s control or within that person’s capacity to understand.

Those of us who are at least familiar with the idea of
virtue ethics know that this free-will/determinism dichotomy completely misses
the point. Of course, there is such a thing as personal responsibility, but it
has to be learned through practices situated within one’s culture. One is not born
with the virtues of justice, temperance, prudence, courage, faith, hope, or
charity. They require models and masters, patience and practice.

Opinion pieces are already circulating that castigate anyone
who tries to describe the extra-personal social forces that create and exacerbate
the kinds of hatred (yes, but also social
structures and history!) that contributed to the election of Trump and the
Republican political trifecta. And in many cases, unbeknownst to those who
engage in this culture of calling-out (yes, it is important to name these
things) that are motivated by the desire to present one’s own bona fides as the superior moral being and a way to demonstrate to oneself and everyone else that “I am one of the
elect.”

While many may not share my Christian convictions, that all
of us are fallen, all subject to the temptations of pride and power, that all
of us need forgiveness now and again, and that redemption is always still possible,
a gift on offer to anyone willing to repent, atone, and adopt an attitude of
contrition... apart from all that, there are other practical, political concerns here.

Right now, there are substantial numbers of people – especially white
people blinded by privilege, indoctrinated by prejudice, and surrounded by
others who both police and reinforce their beliefs and actions – who are part
of our political opposition. Is the solution ultimately to suppress them by
force, assuming that is even possible? No. They have to be changed. There are
many ways to do that, and some will be changed by their own experience. Before
the Russian Revolution (and I am not advocating Bolshevism), the same peasants
who overthrew the government in 1917 were throwing their hats in the air months earlier to
celebrate the great adventure ahead, fighting Germans for Mother Russia. Their grim
experience of the war changed them. I can assure you that many of those who
voted for Trump will soon be damaged by the vandalism and sheer stupidity of the
incoming government. I lived in North Carolina for many years, where we saw
former Klansmen become sincere and energetic anti-racists. Let me point out
again, for more than two decades, I was an instrument of the bloodiest foreign
policies of the United States. There was a time when I would have put a bullet
in your head on an unquestioned command.

Politics should, with enough humility to admit we can’t know
everything, be based on some sort of systematic understanding of as many social
forces as possible that bear on the current situation and point to how that
situation is likely to evolve. A friend wrote me yesterday, “I am hearing high profile activists calling
for everyone to be totally clear that this election was only about racism.
Anyone saying anything else, even that racism has been fueled by economic
uncertainty, is being called out on FB and Twitter for sounding ‘conciliatory.’
Anyone naming that we need interracial populism is being shuffled into
one or another giant movement... functioning to silence and shame people
trying to point out the complications.”

This is, again,
understandable, given the legitimate anxiety about recent developments, but ill-considered
and ultimately divisive.

White male
supremacy is a key problem here, but it is intersected with capitalism,
militarism, consumerism, our actual technologies, and a culture of simulacra.
It is not simply a personal moral failing, but a structural reality with roots going
far back into history and embedded in our institutions.

I have even heard
lefty-boys who make remarks like, “Trump was elected by in-breeders,”
suggesting that the person writing this drivel is – aha! – from superior
genetic stock, one of the elect.

This
self-righteous call-out-culture-of-the-elect has even infected the first
glimmerings of resistance to the government-elect. Within one day of Trump’s victory, people
began adopting a practice that had been employed in the United Kingdom during
the Brexit campaign. A tremendous upsurge of violent xenophobia was directed at
immigrants throughout Great Britain, and British opponents of this xenophobia
began wearing safety pins visibly on their clothing as a sign to immigrants
that they opposed that xenophobia and that they would stand by them if
attacked. It gave immigrants an easy way to identify potential allies, and it
was extremely effective at reducing violence and reassuring those who were at
risk.

In the United
States, people have begun wearing the pins (as I do everywhere I go now,
including to surgery yesterday) for the same reason. It says, I am your ally if
you are a person of color, an immigrant, a woman, LGBT, Jewish, et al. If you
are a target of the proto-fascist alt-right, I will stand by you.

Almost
immediately, a Huffingtonpost writer, Christopher Keelty, a white male non-profit
fundraiser from Boston, wrote an article entitled, “Dear White People, YourSafety Pins Are Embarrassing.” (I suggest that white people never entitle their
own articles “Dear White People”.) I have seldom seen an article with more fallacies
and self-righteous nonsense packed into so little space, and the comments that
he received were overwhelmingly WTF. A white guy lecturing others, in ways that
made no sense, about white privilege! Seriously?

The whole screed was exactly the kind of I’m-more-revolutionary-than-thou
self-righteousness never fails to divide and discourage any politics of resistance.
Calling-out just to hear himself call-out.We are wearing these in our town, black, white, and
Latin@ are wearing pins, and people are thanking us because they are afraid.
But more importantly, this kind of belittling of small actions discourages and
insults the people who may be for the first time dipping their toe into
activism, and those people for whom this is, for many reasons, the most and
best they can do right now. I know an 80-year-old nun who is wearing it, and
she probably wouldn’t be able to do long marches or place herself between a
violent perpetrator and a victim (though she might try, she’s pretty brave).

Everyone in the struggle ahead is not going to be
stood up as a soldier In Keelty’s army, but if we want to ensure we stay as
small and weak as possible, the best way is to humiliate those who are just
starting, just trying to find their courage. This article says “I am the real
man, down with the Real Revolution (TM),” and he is embodying the reason the
left in the US has always succeeded in marginalizing itself.

The elect.

He wrote, “We don’t get to make ourselves feel
better by putting on safety pins and self-designating ourselves as allies.”

But, of course, that isn’t anyone’s motivation that I know, and my own reply,
as one with many family members (including multiracial children and grandkids)
in the gunsights of these dangerous reactionaries, is “You don’t get to make
yourself feel better by belittling your allies and potential allies. The danger
is the other way.” What I really wanted to say to this arrogant young man who
has plumbed the motivations of every white person who is not as evolved as him is,
“Hey Christopher, take a flying f#$% at a rolling donut.” We'll take any kind
of help we can get. We want to grow the resistance, not build a wall of
self-righteous purity around it.

What he failed to realize, in
constructing this false dichotomy between wearing the pins and taking “real
action” (which is, for him, making a sign that says Black Lives Matter, as if
people couldn’t do both at the same time) is how he reinscribing a very
gendered dualism.

The
safety pin campaign is ‘symbolism’ (ick ick), not ‘ACTION’ (hoorah!), and these
are somehow mutually exclusive. It is just a rehash of the old gendered trope
that MEN are INSTRUMENTAL while ((women)) are ((expressive)). Maps right onto a
bunch of other fallacious dualisms, each of which also has gendered origins
(CULTURE-nature, MIND-body, RATIONAL-emotional). In
the Huffpo article, this young white man seems unaware of that genealogy, as
well as the fact that a ‘symbolic’ gesture like the safety pin is, as we said,
not mutually exclusive of other forms of action. In fact, it can direct those
who feel endangered to the very people who are likely to help.

Given
that Keelty has enough education and experience to understand this, his claims
that my friend, for example, the 80-year-old nun, is “embarrassing,” cannot be
the motivated by some logic. The only thing I can figure out that motivates him
is the desire to put someone else down who is doing no harm (and may be
reassuring someone in danger) because he needs to build himself up at their
expense as proof of his oh-so-revolutionary bona
fides. He is one of the elect, our natural leader; and this is exactly the
wrong time for these elect to be
riding the brakes.

I've no doubt that you would make a great dog catcher, if you so choose. It's a necessary task for humans and animals.I didn't know about the pins, but I always have a white rose, inside and out, in remembrance of Sophie Scholl.May I presume that you are aware that Veterans for Peace were kicked out of the Las Vegas Veterans Day parade? Lastly, whatever your surgery was, I hope it was successful!Fondly, Viv

Thank you for this post, and your other works. I read Full Spectrum Disorder in '03/'04 when I had my mosquito wings, and found the message to be insightful and compelling, even then. I stayed in, but as I advanced within the ranks, eventually working in several places you did, I came to understand your perspective even better, and grew increasingly agitated with the state of the system. Now that I am no longer involved with the gov, I am re-reading your earlier writing and this blog with a more grounded view. I hope you don't mind my saying that it is helping me gain some perspective, some of which I am trying to pass on to others as I am able. If you have any recommended excerpts about your journey to find your current stability post-military which you think might help some of us from your old community who are seeking an alternative view, I'd appreciate you highlighting them.